Safe and Clean Web Browsing

The web is a mix of high and low quality content. This article gives advice about how to configure and use the internet browser to find clean content on the web. We will discuss how to turn off images, and how to disable plug-ins that display images, and how to use search on the internet.

Safety

If you want to find good content on the internet, your computer must be free of viruses. When there is a security leak in a web browser, a web page might be able to install a computer virus. But also when you are not using a browser, viruses could enter the computer, when you have a connection to the internet. Therefore, it is important to use up-to-date anti-virus software, or use software that contains no security leaks.

Images off

A web page usually contains text and images. Often, the images on a web page are not really necessary. The images are mere decorations, or advertisements. In this case, the text content provides enough information. Some images on web sites are dirty. These are reasons to turn off images by default and display only those images that we want to see.

To turn off images in Internet Explorer:

1. Go to the Extra menu, and choose Internet Options.
   The Internet Options window appears.
2. Click on the Advanced tab.
3. Scroll about 40% down.
4. Uncheck Display images, Play animations, videos, (sounds,) etc.

To turn off images in Firefox:

1. Go to the Extra menu, and choose Options.
2. Click on the globe with the text 'Content'.
3. Uncheck 'Load images'

Browsing without images

Browsing without images can be difficult. Images sometimes contain important information. By following the advice below, it will be easier.

Alternative text

Display a hidden image

Sometimes you want to display a hidden image, but right clicking on the image does not work. This occurs when there is some script on the page that has modified the context menu. To prevent this in Internet Explorer, we could disable all scripting:

1. Go to the menu 'Extra', and choose 'Internet Options'.
   The 'Internet Options' window appears.
2. Click on the 'Security' tab.
3. Click on the globe with the text 'Internet'.
4. Click on the button 'Custom Level ...'
   A new window opens.
5. In this window disable scripting.
6. Click Ok to save the changed settings.

In Firefox, we can specifically disallow a script to modify the context menu of an image:

1. Go to the menu 'Extra', choose 'Options'.
   The Options window opens.
2. Click on the globe with the text 'Content'.
3. Click on 'Advanced' next to 'Enable Javascript'.
   A new window opens.
4. Uncheck the option that enables modification to context menus.
5. Click Ok twice to save the changed settings.

Temporarily display all images

The Firefox extension ImagePref allows you to show images and hide images with a single mouse click.

In Firefox there is also the convenient option to show only images from a certain site.

1. Go to the menu 'Extra', and choose 'Options'.
2. Click on the globe with the text 'Content'.
3. Leave the option 'Load images' unchecked.
4. Click on the Exceptions button next to 'Load images'. A window opens where you can add or remove sites.

Images as links

Images are often used as links to other web pages. Because the image is not shown, it is less clear where the link points to. Of course, you could right click on the image, and choose to view it. But when there are many images, and many links on a page, this becomes cumbersome. As an alternative you can move the mouse on the hidden image. The link destination will be displayed at the bottom of the screen, on the status bar.

If a web site is not easy to navigate, because of hidden images, and you do not want to display them, you can also try to use a search engine, and search for "site:<site name>". Do not type the "" and replace <site name> by the URL of the site (e.g. www.website.com), and possibly add more search words. The search will then be limited to the specified site only.

Hidden text

When the background image is not loaded, the text can become invisible when the text and the background have the same color. This can be solved sometimes by selecting the text with mouse. The text will then become readable.

Another way to view hidden text, is to open the HTML-source of the page:

1. Choose in the menu: View, (Page) Source.

The hidden text is somewhere between the HTML-codes. A link starts with <a href="..."> (The destination location of the link is after href=), and a link ends with </a>.

Disable plug-ins

If you would only turn images off, and continue browsing, you would notice that not all images and movies are removed. This is because these images and movies are displayed by so-called 'plug-ins' like Java and Flash. Because we can not effectively control the behavior of these plug-ins, I will describe techniques to disable or uninstall them.

Disable plug-ins of Internet Explorer

Unfortunately, there is no easy way to uninstall plug-ins of Internet Explorer. But it is possible to disable them, by setting the security of Internet Explorer higher:

1. Go to the menu 'Extra', and choose 'Internet Options'. The 'Internet Options' window appears.
2. Click on the 'Security' tab.
3. Click on the globe with the text 'Internet'.
4. Click on the button 'Custom Level ...' A new window opens.
5. In this window, disable everything related to ActiveX, and Java.
6. Click Ok to save the changed settings.

Flash is a plug-in that is installed by default. Instead of disabling the Flash plugin, it also possible to download and run the Flash player uninstaller. It can occur that Flash is reinstalled when you install some other program.

Disable plug-ins of Firefox

Disable Add-ons

Add-ons in Firefox version 2 are called extenstions in Firefox version 1.5. To uninstall add-ons or extensions that you have previously installed:

1. Go to the menu 'Extra', and choose 'Add-ons' or 'Extensions'.
2. A new window opens, where you select and then uninstall add-ons.

To turn off Java:

1. Go to the menu 'Extra', choose 'Options'.
2. Click on the globe with the text 'Content'.
3. Uncheck 'Enable Java'

Disable other plugins

To view a list of the installed plugins in Firefox:

1. In Firefox, type 'about:plugins' in the address bar where you normally type an internet address, and press Enter.

To disable the plug-ins installed in the Firefox directory:

1. Start Windows Explorer
2. Browse to the installation directory of Firefox. This is usually "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox".
3. Rename the subdirectory "plugins" to "plugins-old".

To disable the Windows Media Player plug-in:

1. In Firefox, type 'about:config' in the address bar
2. Type: "windowsm" in the Filter.
3. Double click on 'plugin.scan.WindowsMediaPlayer'.
4. Type 100.0 as value. (The default value is 7.0. It is the minimum version of Windows Media Player that will be used as plug-in).
5. Restart Firefox

The Adobe Acrobat reader plug-in can be used to read PDF documents inside your browser. This plug-in does not display images inside web pages, but for completeness, the procedure to disable this plug-in is presented here:

1. Start Windows Explorer
2. Browse to the directory "C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 5.0\Reader\Browser" (Adapt when you have another version of Adobe Acrobat).
3. Rename "nppdf32.dll" to for example "-nppdf32.dll"

Browsing without plug-ins

Browsing without plug-ins can present problems. Some sites only offer content for the Flash plug-in, so we cannot use these sites when the plug-in is disabled. But often there is another site that provides the same content, but then text-based.

As an alternative to using the PDF reader plug-in, you can use the HTML-version that is sometimes provided by a search engine. Another alternative is to download the PDF to your computer, and then open it, instead of opening it inside the browser.

An inconvenience of Internet Explorer 6 is that it displays a message box when a site wants to use an ActiveX control, but is not allowed to do so, because of the security settings. As a solution, it is sometimes possible to block the ActiveX, Flash or Java components in anti-virus software. In that case, the message box will not be displayed.

Start-up page

It is adviced to change the default start-up page of the browser. The start-up page is the first web page that is loaded automatically when you start the browser.

To change the start-up page in Internet Explorer:

1. Go to the menu 'Extra', choose 'Internet Options'.
2. Edit the text in the start-up page edit box. To use a blank start-up page, click on the button 'Blank page', or type "about:blank".

To change the start-up page in Firefox:

1. Go to the menu 'Extra', choose 'Options'.
2. Click on the first section, titled something like 'General'.
3. Edit the text in the start-up page edit box. To use a blank start-up page, type: "about:blank".

Web Searching

When we have our browser settings right, it is now time to actually browse around the internet, and search for some interesting and useful content. Of course, sometimes you already know the address of a web site (the URL) you want to visit, from an earlier visit, or from some other source. Sometimes, you only know that you want to know something about a specific subject. Then you can use a search engine.

When you use a search engine, it is important to be specific with the words you search for. Try to search for words that will only be used in the sites that you want to visit. If you do not know these words yet, you can try to search first with other words, in order to find the search words you need. It also helps to put your search words between quotation marks ("...") if they must appear next to each other in the text.

It is important to quickly review the excerpt of the site that search engines show, before clicking on the link. It often shows much of the character of the site. When it is vague or chaotic, it is probably not a quality site.

Search engines often give better results, than using link directories. Link directories might exclude very good sites, or include links to sites which do not belong there. Also, they often do not contain excerpts of the sites they are linking to.